Comrade Kollontai has forwarded your letter on to me. I have read and
reread it attentively. I can understand your passionate protest against the
emigrant colony, which apparently did anything but please you. The
experience of 1905, however, has proved, in my opinion, that there are
emigrants and emigrants. Part of the emigrant body, which prior to 1905 had
devised the slogans and tactics of revolutionary Social-Democracy, proved
in the years 1905–07 to be closely linked with the mass revolutionary
movement of the working class in all its forms. The same applies
today, in my opinion. If the slogans are correct, if the tactics are the
right ones, the mass of the working class, at a given stage of development
of its revolutionary movement, is bound to come round to these
slogans. You write that for the people “Plekhanov is merely a name”. I
cannot agree with this, although, perhaps, the difference between us here
is only a seeming one. Plekhanov is the most striking, and in Russia,
thanks to the bourgeois and liquidator press, the most popular
exponent of the extremely wide spread “people’s” patriotism. In showing
up Plekhanov we are, in fact, answering a host of questions, thoughts,
doubts, and so on, that arise in the minds of the people. But, of course,
it is up to an intelligent propagandist and agitator to translate
the dispute of a revolutionary inter nationalist Marxist with Plekhanov
into another language, to approach the matter in a different way,
to make allowance for the specific qualities of the environment, etc., etc.

For that matter, you probably take the same view your self, since you
distinguish only the “Left trends” (the
Socialist-Revolutionaries and Social-Democrats) and our dispute with
Plekhanov & Co. is precisely that of determining and separating trends.

As to the urgency of the problem of sending people to Russia you are
quite right. We do what we can in this field lately.

The other day I received another letter from a Socialist-Revolutionary,
who writes that after the conference of the Trudoviks+Popular
Socialists+Socialist-Revolutionaries in Russia (a chauvinist
conference)[2] he gives the Socialist-Revolutionary Party up as a bad
job. I, too, doubt whether it has any viable elements in it. At
any rate, I consider it a fact that there are now 2 main
revolutionary trends in Russia: the revolutionary chauvinists (to
over throw the tsar in order to defeat Germany) and the
revolutionary-proletarian internationalists (to overthrow the tsar as a
means of assisting the international revolution of the
proletariat). Any rapprochement between these trends beyond occasional
“joint actions” is, in my opinion, impossible and harmful. The war has
linked together the proletariat of all the great powers of Europe,
the war has placed on the order of the day the task of putting
into effect proletarian solidarity. A difficult task, to be sure, but one
that is posed by life itself and cannot be shelved.

If you are going to work in Russia and should you wish to help the Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Left Social-Democrats, I would advise
giving help to each of them separately, helping to
link[1]
the respective groups, both in different places among themselves, and with
the centres abroad. The Social-Democrats separately, the
Socialist-Revolutionaries separately. This will yield definite
benefit and make for less squabbling. Rapprochement,
when possible, will proceed more normally. There will be greater
trust.

P.S. You may write to me at the address printed in our Geneva
Sotsial-Demokrat.

Notes

[1]Literaturewill gain from the establishment of such
contacts. It will become more lively, more useful, closer to the people
both with the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Social-Democrats. —Lenin

[2]The Conference of Popular Socialists, Trudoviks and Socialist
Revolutionaries in Russia, held in July 1915 in Petrograd, passed
a resolution calling upon the masses to “defend the fatherland” in the
imperialist war.